TRANSITIONS
What I love the most about transitions, in life and in work, is the heightened awareness of what is otherwise taken for granted. This post I’ll talk about my transition to my new nursing position, and the ways I’m noticing transitions in my life being really fulfilling and also really hard.
NURSING… FROM MEDICAL TO SURGICAL
I recently started my second travel assignment on a cardiac surgery unit. I’m still working in Boston, only five stories up from my last assignment. Since I’m in the same hospital, the charting system is the same, a couple of the faces are familiar, and most of the paperwork was done. The transition should be a breeze. BUT. I may have been a little naïve about the transition from medical floor nurse to surgical floor nurse.
Do you remember the scrubs episode where they explain medical vs. surgical? JD, the protagonist, is on the “medical” side, while his best friend Turk is on the “surgical” side. On the medical side, doctors prescribe medications to fix health problems and on the surgical side, you fix them with a scalpel. If you’d like to see them dance it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBcWt407iTE.
During my last assignment, I was on a medical/ telemetry floor that specialized in heart failure. A lot of these patients have so many chronic issues they DON’T EVEN QUALIFY for surgery. We treat them with medicine to help the heart failure until the medicine starts to ruin the kidneys and then… well, it’s up to the patient, but the answers aren’t easy. Many of these people have long hospital stays and end up coming back with the same problem. Each patient, their long list of health problems, and their willingness to put up with hospital shenanigans is different.
All cardiac surgery patients have something in common: MAJOR CARDIAC SURGERY. A cardiac surgery patient has had their sternum sawed apart, their heart operated on, and their sternum then wired back together. There are expectations about what should be happening on day 1,2,3,4, etc. out of surgery that makes this type of nursing feel much more methodical. The methodology of it is growing on me but is a bit of a learning curve considering that I knew none of it before my two days of orientation.
AND THIS: The test of attention is a tool this hospital has nursing staff use to assess each patient daily for increasing confusion. As part of my physical assessment, I ask the patients to say either the months of the year backward, the days of the week backward, or count backward from 10, depending on their cognitive capacity. When I ask a medical patient to do this, 9/10 they tell me “I’ve already done this” and it’s often hard to figure out if they CAN’T do it or they just don’t want to. Surgical patients? “Decembah, Novembah, Octobah, etc” without being asked twice. Hmmmm.
FROM BROOKLINE TO NEWTONVILLE
I’m living in Newtonville, exchanging one beautiful, upper-class, Whole Foods infested neighborhood for another one. I no longer commute by walking, I now take the commuter rail two stops into the city during the week, and will be driving for weekends and night shift. At the end of May, I will be moving again, this time to Cambridge, which is right in the middle of everything. This feels like a lot of moving to me, and while I believe it will be worth it, that leads me to…
HOLLY AND TRANSITIONS
This week I got DRENCHED coming home from work TWICE. Both of these days I left the house before 6am and got home close to 9pm, wet and cold, with my raincoat forgotten in Pittsburgh and my umbrella forgotten in Newtonville. Instead of dishing out an hour worth of wages for an uber (?? is this my Dutch heritage??), I walked the 0.8 mi to the train station in hard, steady, rainfall, with my way-too-long drawstrings painfully hitting my cold legs, and my face turned up to the sky while being pelted by raindrops. Not exactly what I signed up for.
I also, this week, locked myself out of the house with no shoes, and no promise of my roommate coming home for another four hours. Thankfully, I had my phone and my roommate was able to call me an tell me how to get back in the house, so the episode only lasted a couple minutes. Still, there was that moment of reckoning when I realized I was stuck with nowhere to go, and with only one person could possibly help me. The only person who could help me, I had only met two days before. And what if I hadn’t had my phone?
Mom and Dad, please don’t be scared! I’m really doing well! People who know me well know that I have a tendency to be forgetful; however, something about transitions leaves me especially vulnerable to these bizarre experiences. After all, neither of those situations would have happened in Pittsburgh. I’m out here learning a whole new way of doing life, and it’s life-giving and exciting and it’s teaching me to trust myself in a way I never have before, but apparently, it also means getting caught in the rain. For now, I’m OK with that.
These are each from later on during my first assignment. The first was taken during a run and features is the Charles River and a pretty sweet view Boston. The second was taken walking home from nightshift, an absolutely breathtaking moment featuring the firehouse in Brookline that signified I was getting close to home. The last photo is at the Boston Public Garden, taken two days before I drove back to the Burgh for the week. The grass was FINALLY turning green.
Then I got to Pittsburgh after a nine-hour drive to find that SPRING HAD SPRUNG! Definitely set the mood for a wonderful week.
On the way back to Boston I stopped in Newtown, CT to see my Aunt and cousins. We went to NYC to see a Broadway show and to celebrate my cousins birthday!
These photos are from this week, featuring the only decent photo I have of Newtonville so far (it is very beautiful, however) and my fav. English grad student.
Until next time!
Holly & Travel Nursing 